---
title: "Which came first, Twitter or YouTube?"
description: "Twitter vs YouTube: YouTube came first, by one year — 2005 against 2006. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/twitter-vs-youtube/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Twitter or YouTube?

**Which came first, Twitter or YouTube?: YouTube**

2005 — one year before Twitter

YouTube came first, by one year. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

## Side by side

|  | Twitter | YouTube |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2006 | 2005 |
| Date | 2006-03-21 | 2005-02-14 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. | The domain was registered; the first video followed in April. |

## Twitter

The first tweet — "just setting up my twttr" — went out on 21 March 2006, and the service opened publicly that July. The 140-character limit came from SMS: a text message allows 160 characters and 20 were reserved for the username. When the limit doubled to 280 in 2017 the SMS constraint had been irrelevant for years.

## YouTube

The youtube.com domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005, the first video — "Me at the zoo", 19 seconds of a co-founder at San Diego Zoo — was uploaded on 23 April, and the site opened publicly in the winter. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, about twenty months after the domain was registered. It is younger than Facebook by a year and older than Twitter by one.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Twitter or YouTube?

YouTube, by one year — 2005 against 2006.

### When did Twitter start?

2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.

### When did YouTube start?

2005. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]